Empty Promises

blow things up just for the hell of it.”
    The fall of 1979 was bitterly lonely for John Stickney. Leigh was so far away, caught up in the excitement of college life, going to football games, participating in dorm activities. She had told him that she planned on dating other men. That was the most agonizing part for him to accept. John was handsome, and he had a job that paid well; plenty of Mercer Island girls would gladly have dated him. But he wasn’t interested. He wanted only Leigh. Every night he was on the phone calling her, trying to persuade her to come back to him. His constant calls only made her pull away more. What he had feared most was coming true: Leigh was interested in another man.
    John’s calls continued. Finally, Leigh’s roommate complained to the dorm adviser that she couldn’t use the phone because John called so much. The phone rang constantly whether Leigh was in her dorm room or not. When John did catch her in, he dragged out the conversations as if he could bind her to him with a telephone cord.
    Several times during the fall, John drove to the Washington State campus, deliberately arriving unexpectedly. Each time, he convinced himself that everything would be all right again. And sometimes Leigh seemed glad to see him. But there were also times when she tried to tell him that it was really over between them and that he had to stop coming to Pullman. It was a twelve-hour drive round-trip, which gave him time to obsess about what he had lost.
    John was on an emotional yo-yo. Of course the more he tried to hold on to Leigh, the more she pulled away. She felt suffocated. One can only imagine his thoughts as he made the grueling trip—up over Snoqualmie Pass, where the blizzards piled up drifts of snow from November to May, and then across the endless rolling wheat fields of the Palouse country. There weren’t many towns along the way to take John’s mind off his mission.
    As Christmas neared, John began to realize that Leigh really was leaving him. He had tried pleading and cajoling. Worse, he’d even tried physically forcing her into his car when he saw her walking on campus. Her reaction was to pull even further away from him. Any love she’d had for him was now gone. Leigh was only eighteen; she wanted to be free. At first, she thought John would give up peaceably. She was as deluded as every other woman who realizes too late that she has become the focal point of a man’s obsessive love.
    Leigh Hayden began to be frightened. She no longer wanted to see John at all. Leigh tried to focus on her new world. She told Janet McKay, a senior who served as a resident adviser in her dorm, that John had been bothering her. She wanted to make it official that he was not a welcome visitor. If he came around to surprise her, she didn’t want to have to talk to him.
    Lovesick boyfriends aren’t that unusual in college dorms. Leigh’s friends and counselors realized that John always seemed to be shadowing her, but they all assumed he’d give up sooner or later. Leigh and her roommate lived on the fifth floor of the Streit-Perham Dormitory in the middle of the Wazzu campus, near the Performing Arts Coliseum. The dormitory, which was built in 1962, consisted of two six-story towers connected by a common lounge and dining room. Approximately 550 students were housed in the towers, and 46 of them lived on the fifth floor of Perham Hall where Leigh Hayden lived. It was a coeducational dorm, a circumstance which would have horrified the parents of college students two decades earlier, and John Stickney hated the arrangement.

    It was the week before Christmas 1979. Residents of the Streit-Perham towers were preparing to pack up and go home for the holidays. Washington State was on a semester system, so Christmas festivities were not marred by the tension of final exams. Those would come later, at the end of January. This was a time for fun and celebration, and many groups of students crossed the state line into Moscow, Idaho, less than fifteen miles away, where the legal drinking age was eighteen. The county and state cops kept a permanent watch on the roads between Pullman and Moscow, trying to keep accidents and DUI tickets among the student drivers to a minimum.
    The towers of Streit-Perham were decorated for the holidays, and most of the residents had adorned their rooms with holly, fir boughs, and miniature Christmas trees. Winter snow was the rule rather than the exception in Pullman, and